Tomorrow Never Comes!

3, 2, 1, Happy NewYear! 

Well folks it’s almost a new year… or is it?

Think for a momemt about the typical new year’s eve. All eyes are on the clock, especially the last ten seconds. We all do the big countdown. There is a big focus on the last ten seconds.

We humans just love dividing time. We divide by millennium, century, decade, year, month, week, day, hour, and second. But we don’t end at seconds. We divide time even further. There are centiseconds (one hundredth of a second), milliseconds (one thousandth of a second), microseconds (one millionth of a second), nanoseconds (one billionth), and there are picoseconds (one trillionth). There are also the further divided (yet very unpopular) femto, atto, zepto and yocto seconds! I’m not making this up. Click here for more details.

So What Am I Getting At?

Well, as the title suggests, tomorrow will never come. That means that the new year will never come. Imagine all those people at Times Square in NYC freezing off their buns, and counting down from 10. But when they get to that last second it can be divided by 100 or 1000 or 1000000000000 or even 1000000000000000000000000000000000000000000! Actually it can be divided infinitely. How long would it take to get through an infinite number of divisions? Well I guess it would take an infinity! So those poor people in Times Square should be standing there for an infinite amount of time. But after 1 they always say ZERO!!! And then they all go home because they think the new year has come. However, the new year must just be an illusion because they could not travel an infinity… otherwise it would not have been infinity.

The Logic of Things

Chew on this for a bit.

1) We cannot pass through an infinite amount of time

2) The last second before the new year can be divided into an infinite number of sections

3) Therefore there will never be a new year

Think this through. The new year has been coming again and again for a long time. So how does it happen? How do we pass through infinity? I’m looking for a bright philosophy major or physics major to help me out on this one.

If Tomorrow Never Comes

Here’s a video by Garth Brooks. I’ve liked his music ever since I was a kid. I’ve seen him twice in concert. After you’re finished with the paradox check out the soundtrack!

Ode To My Wife

Quite honestly, I don’t know what an ode is. But I’m oding anyway (spell check doesn’t think that oding is a word… oh well).

Normally I blog about music or philosophy or death. But today its my wife’s turn to be blogged about. We were best friends before we got married, and still are. I love her a lot. I’m glad I get to spend the rest of my life with her because she makes life great. Real great. She’s fun to talk to and hang out with. She’s smart and faithful. She’s a very loving person! I remember how beautiful she looked coming down the isle. She walked down the isle to What a Wonderful Worldby Louis Armstrong. This is the slightly more punk rock version by the Ramones. Check it out.

Seinfeld and Death…

Seinfeld is one of my favorite TV shows. Most people seem to enjoy it. Every once in a while the writers seem to work something really deep into an episode. I posted a portion of script below from the episode called The Pony Remark (I recently posted all three parts of the episode in video form too). The bold part of the script is a gem and its wedged discretely between a conversation about casual sex and a baseball game (in true Seinfeld fashion of course)! It’s a conversation about death. The awkward topic of human mortality. I almost guarantee you’ve found yourself at a funeral thinking the same thing.

Apathy

I’m pretty sure that most of us ought to take our lives a little more seriously than we do, and hopefully this Seinfeld clip will get you reflecting on that. But like most people you’ll find yourself thinking the same thing at the next funeral… and the next. Never really changing. Well except now you’ll be thinking about Seinfeld too!

You’ll likely notice that after time it’ll get easier and easier to push away that nagging feeling that you ought to change. At first you’ll panic like Elaine. Then you’ll slide into the easy chair of apathy. Who knows you might even adopt a twist of Jerry’s gentle sarcasm. The show is hilarious and hopefully it gets you thinking… maybe even doing?

See the five minute mark in video number two for this part of the script.

[Setting: Coffee Shop]

ELAINE: I actually like ponies. I was just trying to make conversation. What time’s your game?

JERRY: Two Forty-Five.

ELAINE: And what time’s the funeral?

JERRY: Two o’ clock.

ELAINE: How long does a funeral take?

JERRY: Depends on how nice the person was. But you gotta figure, even Oswald took forty-five minutes.

ELAINE: So you can’t do both?

JERRY: You know, if the situation were reversed and Manya had some mah-jongg championship or something, I wouldn’t expect her to go to my funeral. I would understand.

ELAINE: How can you even consider not going?

GEORGE: You know, I’ve been thinking. I cannot envision any circumstances in which I’ll ever have the opportunity to have sex again. How’s it gonna happen? I just don’t see how it could occur.

ELAINE: You know, funerals always make me think about my own mortality and how I’m actually going to die someday. Me, dead. Imagine that.

GEORGE: They always make me take stock of my life and how I’ve pretty much wasted all of it, and how I plan to continue wasting it.

JERRY: I know, and then you say to yourself, “From this moment on, I’m not going to waste any more of it.” But then you go, “How? What can I do that’s not wasting it?”

ELAINE: Is this a waste of time? What should we be doing? Can’t you have coffee with people?

GEORGE: You know, I can’t believe you’re even considering not playing. We need you. You’re hitting everything.

ELAINE: He has to go. He may have killed her.

JERRY: Me? What about you? You brought up the pony.

ELAINE: Oh, yeah, but I didn’t say I hated anyone who had one.

GEORGE: (To Jerry) Who’s going to play left field?

JERRY: Bender.

GEORGE: Bender? He can’t play left. He stinks. I just don’t see what purpose is it going to serve your going? I mean, you think dead people care who’s at the funeral? They don’t even know they’re having a funeral. It’s not like she’s hanging out in the back going, “I can’t believe Jerry didn’t show up.”

ELAINE: Maybe she’s there in spirit. How about that?

GEORGE: If you’re a spirit, and you can travel to other dimensions and galaxies, and find out the mysteries of the universe, you think she’s going to want to hang around Drexler’s funeral home on Ocean Parkway?

ELAINE: George, I met this woman! She is not traveling to any other dimensions.

GEORGE: You know how easy it is for dead people to travel? It’s not like getting on a bus. One second. It’s all mental.

JERRY: Fifty years they were married. Now he’s moving to Phoenix.

ELAINE: Phoenix? What’s happening with his apartment?

JERRY: I don’t know. They’ve been in there since, like, World War II. The rent’s three hundred a month.

ELAINE: Three hundred a month? Oh my God.

(Scene ends)

Script from – www.seinfeldscripts.com/ThePonyRemark.htm